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Businesses can expect an end to corporate welfare if Doug Ford gets to be premier. They’ll have to get ready for tailored tax-incentive packages instead.

Do these sound like kind of the same thing? Yeah, getting a handle on what the new Progressive Conservative leader stands for is a bit of a job. Maybe the next three months, until the June provincial election that could make him premier, will be different from the six weeks of the Tory leadership campaign.

Reevely: Doug Ford promises business subsidies by another nameBack to video

Take industrial subsidies, a megamillion-dollar affair across multiple ministries under Kathleen Wynne that Ford said repeatedly will have to stop.

In this file image, Ontario Minister of Economic Development and Innovation Brad Duguid spoke during a Ubisoft Toronto press conference to help launch their performance capture studio complete with voice, facial and body recognition technology for video games in Toronto on Thursday, September 13, 2012. The provincial government gave the company $263 million in a long-term subsidy deal.Michelle Siu/The Canadian Press

“We’re going to give companies tax incentives to come up and open here,” Ford said from the Shaw Centre stage during the leadership debate here. “Now, don’t mistake tax incentives for corporate welfare. I’m dead against corporate welfare.”

In a Q&A afterward, I asked him to explain the difference. Here’s his answer:

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“Corporate welfare is giving Bombardier a billion dollars, a few years later another billion, another billion. I don’t believe in that. But giving a tax incentive is encouraging companies here and giving a tax incentive to open up in certain regions. If they’re up north, I’d be more than happy — Procter and Gamble’s leaving Brockville. If Procter and Gamble came up to me and said, ‘What sort of taxes can we save?’, we’d come up with a great plan to keep Procter and Gamble up there. There’s going to be 300 families without a job up there. That’s huge. Absolutely huge.”

Tax incentives wouldn’t be just about keeping businesses in Ontario, he went on.

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“Not only that, I want to attract new companies, too. You know what I like down in the U.S.? You see what’s happening down there? They said manufacturing jobs would never come back. They’re coming back by the droves now. They have the lowest unemployment. This is who we’re competing against. They’re giving tax incentives,” he said.

The Ford family business is Deco, a labels-and-packaging company, which has a large outpost just outside Chicago.

“Every couple of weeks, from a certain state, I’ll get a letter from the chamber of commerce, from the state itself, saying, ‘Here, come to Texas, we’ll help you — even with a building. We’ll even help you hire people, as long as you come here and employ people’,” Ford said.

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“My point was, my friend, we have to be business-friendly here. We are not business-friendly. We have layers and layers of red tape and bureaucracy that we have to cut. We have to make sure that businesses thrive in Ontario, we don’t tax them to death. And a lot of it, yes, I agree, is municipal taxes, municipal — we have the highest hydro rates, the carbon tax that’s done. So just look at the hydro rates, the carbon tax alone. They’re job-killers, absolute job-killers. We’re getting rid of the carbon tax, we’re lowering hydro rates. Next question.”

Bombardier President and CEO Alain Bellemare, right, responds to a question as Heritage Minister Melanie Joly, left, and Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains look on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017 in Montreal. The federal government said it would give Bombardier $372.5 million in repayable loans over four years to support the Global 7000 and CSeries aircraft projects.Paul Chiasson/THE CANADIAN PRESS

Starting with Bombardier is genius-flash No. 1.

Bombardier is a yawning hole into which Liberal and Conservative governments alike have shovelled money because Bombardier simulates a real Canadian aerospace industry and politicians like the jobs it provides in Quebec. There’s no sign it’ll ever get off the government teat, though, which is the purported objective of government subsidy programs.

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If you want to beat up on this company, millions of people will be there for you. I’ll be there for you. Good start.

Practically, there’s not much difference between underwriting Bombardier’s production lines and tailoring a tax-incentive package to make Procter and Gamble happy — never mind turning the government into an outsourcing agency for corporations’ human-resources and real-estate needs. Either way, we’re talking about a one-on-one negotiation between the government and a private company to surrender public money into private hands. The benefits go to companies with the resources to hire the best lobbyists and apply the most leverage.

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But one sounds like government picking winners while the other sounds like government getting out of winners’ way.

The results are very relative, though: manufacturing employment peaked at 19.5 million jobs in 1979, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and now it’s at 12.6 million jobs in an economy almost three times as large. The U.S. also had 106 million workers then; now it has 162 million. If manufacturing is a measure of American greatness, there’s 17.2 million factory jobs to go before the United States gets back to where it was 38 years ago.

The Americans aren’t onto some brilliant formula. The people trying to bribe Deco to lay people off in Illinois and hire them in Texas are fighting over scraps.

Genius-flash No. 3 is that digging through the sound bites takes much more time and effort than talking in them. The battle is asymmetric. That’s the nature of politics, but Doug Ford is a gifted practitioner. He’ll destroy the other parties if they let him.

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